10

Mixed-Media, Cross-Genre, Hybrid, and Digital Works

The interplay of text and images was very important, and I think it allows the reader to jump off to consider their own lives because the images are sort of shared islands between us.

—LAWRENCE SUTIN

When I was young, I saw a movie called Earthquake, a movie announced as a new cinematic experience. It used Sensurround, a technology that sent out low frequency sound waves felt in the body more than heard, creating a physical addition to the screen that reflected the film’s quakes, temblors, and general mayhem. Earlier movies used a technology dubbed Smell-O-Vision, a system that released scents into the theater. Though Sensurround never quite caught on, I remember the excitement of sitting in that theater, feeling as well as seeing the events depicted on the screen. The rocks and rumblings felt through the seats made the experience even more immersive.

Sometimes the wonder of a work that is words on the page is exactly what we want. I would have hated anyone adding more to my experience of my favorite book, Jane Eyre, with Sensurround or Smell-O-Vision! I wanted to keep that world in my mind, to fill it with my own inventions.

Later in life, I fell in love with the kind of digital literature I found in online journals like The New River: A Journal of Digital Writing & Art—beautiful works that might use bird calls, the Jewish Midrash, mystery stories with navigable settings. I still never miss an issue; sometimes it’s exciting for more than one of our senses to be engaged in a text-based work. And sometimes we want navigation options that create our own reading and viewing experiences. Still, great literature is great literature. As the editors of The New River put it, “we cannot help but love stories and puzzles. We just find new packages for them.”

—SUZANNE

New Packages

Sometimes we want what Suzanne wanted with a favorite book—words on the page, a story told through one literary medium, ready for the readers’ imaginations. But sometimes adding a poem or a speculative narrative that partakes of fiction is what we need to fully plumb our stories. At other times we feel called upon to add art, video, or other images or sounds to our work. We may want to put our stories into a digital format, allowing the reader freedom of navigation or providing forms that would be hard to bring into an essay—puzzles, video games, moving images, and more. You may want to tie your words to something physical, like the quilt we’ll discuss later in this chapter. We have enormous freedom now, with the possibilities of online publication and with the accessibility of paintings, music, and other nonliterary arts. Nonfiction requires your presence as an author, your own slant. Within that, however, so much is possible.

It can be a little daunting to think of taking your nonfiction beyond the bounds of a traditional essay. Perfecting that form can be hard enough! But what our students have found, over and over, is that the opportunity to expand the means of creative expression becomes exhilarating. Even if it’s on a screen, your text can become a broader sensory experience than words alone. You may, with mixed media, add a physical piece to your writing. Mixing in other genres might give you a chance to do more lyrical or speculative writing than the traditional essay. All of us love more than one kind of book, more than one artistic medium. The modes we discuss here give you a chance to combine your passions.

Combining Text and Other Media

In his book A Postcard Memoir, Lawrence Sutin juxtaposes images from his extensive postcard collection with the brief, vivid reminiscences and ruminations these images inspire in him. Sutin uses fragmentation and interplay between image and text to powerful effect. For example, in his piece “Man and Boy,” Sutin uses an old black-and-white portrait of an anonymous father and son to ruminate on the nature of his relationship to his own father. He sees in this photograph not just the figures of a man and a boy, but the emotional underpinnings and connection implied by the placement of a hand on a leg, the identical smiles, the way man and boy imperceptibly lean toward one another.

Sutin does not spend time describing the photograph; in fact, the prose itself hardly refers to it. Rather, his own story arises from the image, and the details he chooses enable us to look at this photograph through his eyes. In this way, the reader becomes a participant in the creative process. As Sutin remarked in an interview with the Bellingham Review, “The reader can float along with the image in their own way, too, because it’s clear that these aren’t real photographs of my life, so there’s a shared quality to them.”

By using the form of postcards to tell his own story, Sutin automatically gives himself parameters that both contain and liberate his personal history. The images lead him into memories he may not have expected. “In some cases,” Sutin says, “the response to the postcard allowed me to see more clearly what my life meant, more than I knew in advance.” The form of the postcard also necessitated brief vignettes, rather than drawn-out narratives, he explains:

Obviously many, if not all, of my pieces are longer than you could fit on the back of a postcard, even if you had very spidery, tiny handwriting. But the idea of the postcard being a brief recollection, and in my mind, an intense recollection was something that I used. . . . I suppose the typical postcard message is, “Hi, we’re having a great time, wish you were here,” and I was going totally beyond that. Something about the brevity of the message, and the fixed, chosen quality of the image to represent the time or place, those things were important to me.

The postcard medium also carries within itself, intrinsically, the intent of communication—an intimate yet public communication between writer and reader. After all, a postcard is meant only for the recipient, but in the course of its journey can be read by many eyes. By working in the genre of the postcard, Sutin automatically brings these philosophical issues to bear on his writing, and so he is able to craft a voice that is intimate and public at the same time.

This mix of image and text is a relatively simple example of how writers can use other media in their work. But such projects can be as simple or complex as the material demands and in accord with the artistic skills of the writer. For example, book artist Susan King created a piece titled Treading the Maze: An Artist’s Book of Daze. King was diagnosed with breast cancer after returning from a trip through Europe. The book that came out of these experiences, using artwork from Chartres cathedral, charts her travels through these two different types of terrain, physical and medical.

Our students, though generally not trained as artists, have found mixed media both a challenge and a delight. They’ve created a plethora of artifacts incorporating written texts, visual arts, photographs, and whatever other medium the student finds appropriate. We’ve had students incorporate their own music into their presentations or create a website for their final projects. One student printed her essay on strips of paper baked into fortune cookies, and another brought to class a planter full of specimens from an arboretum, each with its own fragment of a nature essay attached. In this last case, the student, Anna, asked her classmates to choose the pieces at random and read the fragments aloud. We all got our fingers covered in dirt, and in so doing collaborated with Anna in creating the shape of the final essay. Another student enlisted the help of her family to sew a quilt that had fragments of her essay (all about family) embedded within.

The possibilities are endless, and one of the side effects of such work is that it so wholly depends on the viewer’s participation for the project to come to fulfillment. In this way, perhaps, mixed-media works are the perfect vessel for creative nonfiction because you connect with your reader in such a concrete way. The use of different media in your creative nonfiction work also allows you to discover new sources of creativity within yourself. Too often, we get bogged down in habitual ways of writing; the requirement to use other media forces us to approach writing from a fresh perspective, and it adds a wonderfully tactile quality to our personal expressions.

Cross-Genre Writing

Cross-genre writing refers to literature that blends more than one literary genre in a single piece, moving across genres or subgenres within the realm of text. A graphic memoir, or illustrated text, would not typically fall under the heading of cross-genre.

This intra-literary movement can happen in many ways: nonfiction that brings in fiction or poetry, for instance, or books that include elements of science fiction or suspense in a text otherwise outside this mode. Unlike hybrid forms, cross-genre writing tends to embrace each literary medium for what it is. In fact, cross-genre writing often underscores the differences between what these forms can do. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, a book he termed a “nonfiction novel,” melded the novel’s immediacy of action with a continually acknowledged presence of journalistic fact.

In Joy Harjo’s memoir, Crazy Brave, the author, a Native American of Creek and Cherokee heritage, blends memoir with forms that reflect both her ancestry and her personal awakenings. Harjo introduces each section of the book with a collective view of the direction it’s named for, such as “East is the direction of beginnings. It is sunrise. When beloved Sun rises, it is an entrance, a door to fresh knowledge.” These invocations present the author’s life as belonging to what preceded her, to the power of her history.

As Harjo’s own life grows out of what she calls “an ancient dance,” she begins to make more memoiristic realizations, such as how necessary poetry becomes to her in making sense of her world. As the power of poetry dawns on Harjo, poetry breaks into the prose. Here is an example, from the first chapter.

I had no way to translate the journey and what I would find there until I found poetry.

THIS IS MY HEART

This is my heart. It is a good heart.

Weaves a membrane of mist and fire.

When we speak love in the flower world

My heart is close enough to sing to you

In a language too clumsy

For human words.

Telling the reader how she fell in love with poetry would not provide the power Harjo creates when a poem breaks into her narrative. In this moment, we sense how the author depends on poetry to navigate her life.

The Hybrid Form

The idea of blending literary forms with other literary forms, or other artistic modes, has always existed as a writer’s strategy, cropping up in works as diverse as William Blake’s illustrated poems, or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which unite prose and verse, religious tract and flatulence joke.

As an identified genre, the hybrid work has been growing in literary importance. Hybrid pieces share qualities with mixed-media and cross-genre works. But hybrids unite more than one element—more than one “meaning-making mode,” in the words of critic Catherine Beavis. Unlike mixed media pieces and cross-genre works, hybrids qualify as hybrids only when those modes influence and change each other, forming something new.

Author Judith Kitchen calls the hybrid form “a mix, a twining, something that makes it neither one nor another.” The introduction to the Rose Metal Press hybrid anthology, Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of Eight Hybrid Literary Genres, describes the result of two (or more) modes in one hybrid work as necessarily a “fertile tension.” Neither mode can simply support or be swallowed up in the other. Photos with text, for example, don’t offer hybridity, if the effect is only to illustrate what the writer has described.

Nick Flynn’s memoir of his relationship with his father, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, uses hybridity as a tool. Flynn’s father was homeless, and his disruptive life serves as the crux of the book. Flynn writes at the opening of his chapter “Santa Lear,” “Each night, like another night in a long-running play, I wander the empty streets, check on every sprawled man until I find him. . . . I am forced to play the son.” The chapter moves from that opening into an actual play, set at the Dunkin’ Donuts where Flynn’s father spent many nights. The characters in this short play are five men in Santa costumes and three daughters. The script draws heavily from Samuel Beckett as well as Shakespeare’s King Lear.

SANTA FOUR exits cell, again to applause, picks up the bullhorn, coughs into it, rubs sleep from his eyes.

DAUGHTER TWO: Froze to death, couldn’t pry the bell from his hand.

SANTA ONE: I was a goner from the first moment, the first check. Doyle set me up. He knew about you kids.

Flynn’s chapter illustrates the “fertile tension” of hybridity. We readers cannot escape from the theatricality of this passage—there is a presumed audience, stage directions, and, as in absurdist theater, some dialogue has no obvious meaning. Flynn’s father has no daughters, nor does he dress as Santa. We cannot dismiss the script material as pure theater either. Flynn introduces the play by saying he himself plays a part, and Santa One’s dialogue in this excerpt is taken directly from Flynn’s father. The scene becomes more than theater and more than memoir.

Digital Literature

Digital literature, also called electronic literature, hypertext, hypermedia, and by other terms, is defined here as literature that takes advantage of organizations, such as linking, available when writing in digital programs. In the early days of digital writing, the organization of a story or an essay was likely done through link-node organization—the familiar way we experience most web texts, with selectable links that move the viewer from one screen to another.

Digital literature is becoming more and more innovative and varied. Literary texts may exist in the form of video with voiceovers, moving paper cutouts, streaming images, with or without link-node movement. Video games, Rubik’s cubes, and games of chance have been used as ways of creating a digital work. A piece by Eric LeMay published in the fall 2016 Bellingham Review, “Nonsense,” offers a mashup of randomly generated text and a Charlie Chaplin film.

A digital work is often spatial in every direction, truly nonsequential—nothing follows by necessity anything else. You can read screen by screen, if the work is organized that way, or read only the first few words of the first screen, then move elsewhere, and so on. You may come to a screen that describes a car accident and only later reach the text that tells you how it happened. The text may be set up to move you without user choice.

Scholars of digital literature use the term decentered—it can (though doesn’t necessarily) become impossible to say where the core of such a digital work lies. French critics Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari compare this writing strategy more poetically to the branching systems of rhizomatic plants such as mints and strawberries, plants spreading via a loose root system that establishes nodes for new plants but has no base: “any point on a rhizome can be connected with any other, and must be. This is very different from a tree or root, which fixes a point and thus an order.” Vannevar Bush, a midcentury thinker who anticipated the development of the internet, pointed out that such a writing system comes much closer to the way we think and learn: nonsequentially, interactively, working off association.

The branching and associational quality of digital writing forms a natural fit with much nonfiction, particularly the type of nonfiction we describe in “What Is the Lyric Essay?” (see Chapter 9, “Innovative Forms: The Wide Variety of Creative Nonfiction”). If you tend to braid your work or imagine a varying organizational structure, this kind of text may be for you. Mixed-media digital literature offers a natural way to use visual images and other media as well: music, chanting, sounds of a tempest at sea. There are few limits on what elements you can weave into your digital nonfiction.

If you have the tech skills, try putting your writing into a format in which you can play around—add music, video, photos, to get a feel for balancing visual elements. Offer linking organization, allowing the viewer to shape the textual experience. Strive for combinations that work together in ways that surprise. As with hybrid work, the most interesting mixing of multiple forms results in something more than either form would be on its own. If you do not have adequate computer skills, don’t give up. Ask around among your friends and even post ads for someone who does have such skills to help you. It is not unusual for digital artists using complex forms to have technical help. Many with computer abilities do not often get offered such interesting, creative challenges.

Blogs and Social Media

As we experience daily, online writing takes many forms. There are the complex forms of much digital literature, and then there are the common genres of blogs, Facebook posts, and those of other social networking sites.

When blogs first began, they were generally web diaries with an author-centered, generalized focus; the term blog was coined in the late nineties as a shortened version of weblog. There are blogs specific to nearly every sector of human society. Even fictional characters on television shows have their own blogs, with legions of avid followers.

Blog as Writing Practice

At its most basic, a simple blog can be a way to focus and structure your own writing practice, giving you deadlines and some measure of accountability. You can use a blog to work out your ideas and begin to draft, and you can interact with other writers through your blog. The blog form lends itself to writing practice because the posts can be short, “occasional” (i.e., tied to a particular occasion or trigger for the thought), and are usually fairly informal while retaining a sense of craft. They could be a way to discipline yourself to work through a particular topic you’ve had on your mind, with more structure than a paper journal entry, but with the same sense of spontaneity and intimacy. Your blog can become the foundation for a subject you want to explore in more depth.

One writer we know set herself a goal of writing fifty blog entries, under the title “Fifty Ways to Be a Brilliant Mom Without Having a Baby.” She chose this topic because, as she puts it, “It could be that I’m a poet with a secret desire to be an advice columnist. So when I couldn’t find any good sites about becoming a stepmom, or having an eccentric elderly mom for a friend, I started this blog.” At first it was to be a private blog, but she wanted the accountability that came with having it available to the public. And by choosing a finite number, fifty, she had a concrete goal and was able to narrow down an overwhelming task to a workable routine. As a result, she wrote her fifty entries, attracted a small but solid group of followers, and now has the beginning of a book around this topic.

TRY IT

1.   Create a mixed-media piece that uses other kinds of documents and images along with your own prose. Make several photocopies of these documents so you can cut them up and experiment. Create collages, paying attention to the kinds of textures you create with these elements.

2.   Collaborate with a photographer, a musician, a painter, a sculptor, or a graphic artist to create a mixed-media work for presentation to an audience.

3.   What literary genres do you love, besides the genre you work in most of the time? Make a list for yourself of literary forms you feel attracted to, using each form as a heading—your list might start with terms like memoir, thrillers, poetry, theater. List qualities of each. What does each genre or subgenre accomplish that the others don’t? The answers might be compression, lyric beauty, excitement, a sense of real time. Pull out an essay of yours that hasn’t quite worked yet, or perhaps a new idea for an essay. What qualities would you like this piece to have that belong to other modes on your list? How could you incorporate both into one cross-genre piece?

4.   Do the preceding activity, but with an eye toward greater blending of your “meaning-making” modes. Add other arts: photography, watercolors, video. The difference between writing cross-genre and hybrid work is often a matter of how you manage reader expectations. Think of Nick Flynn and write a genre mashup in which expectations of each of the modes you work in are never fully realized. Imagine that these modes intertwine, forming something new.

5.   The haibun (the term was probably coined by the great Japanese poet Basho) combines highly lyrical prose segments with haiku. The brief poems end each section of prose, adding a still, focused moment to pieces that may be full of narrative and movement. Read some masterful haibun, then try this form. Note that the five-seven-five syllable structure of haiku is more restrictive in English than it is in Japanese. You may want to experiment with other line lengths, keeping the three-lined, reflective quality of these poems.

6.   Edward Falco, in response to a question about how authors start a piece in hypertextual digital form (with all its many components), said, “There are probably as many different ways of writing hypertext as there are hypertext writers.” Some authors start with a print piece and gradually accrete other nodes of material; some write directly to a hypertext program. One method we’ve found useful is to have everyone assemble index cards and actually map out the architecture of a site—including visual elements like photos and art, if you plan to use them. Lay the potential screens out in front of you, see where links would occur, and practice different navigational options. Seeing your work spatially can ignite ways of using the form. Many website creation programs have prompts that can make linking organizations, the addition of other media, and similar moves easy.

VARIATION FOR A GROUP: Create a group site to house your group’s online “anthology” of digital literature.

7.   Start a simple piece writing directly into a digital program. Challenge yourself to use just three text links (text linked to other screens of text), and only use simple visual images, if you use them at all. Starting out in hypertext by trying to include complicated animation or the like may give you the false impression that this form is too difficult to master. It isn’t; it’s a series of small steps. Start with a few steps, and you will most likely be excited by the possibilities you see before you.

8.   Spend some time reading blogs on a topic that’s close to your heart. Take note of the voices that attract you, those that repel you, and those that leave you neutral. Write up a list of those attributes, and then see how you might learn from them for your own writing—on a blog or otherwise.

9.   Start a blog with the idea of a finite number of entries: “Fifty Ways” or “Twenty-Five Views of” or “Thirty Considerations,” and so on. Commit to posting at least once a week, no matter what.

FOR FURTHER READING

Resources Available Online

•   Electronic Literature Organization

•   Treading the Maze: An Artist’s Book of Daze by Susan King

•   “Nonsense” by Eric LeMay in the Bellingham Review

•   The New River: A Journal of Digital Writing and Art

Print Resources

•   In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

•   Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir by Nick Flynn

•   Crazy Brave: A Memoir by Joy Harjo

•   Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of Eight Hybrid Literary Genres, edited by Jacqueline Kolosov and Marcela Sulak

•   A Postcard Memoir by Lawrence Sutin